Chris McCausland, the blind comedian, has been declared the winner of Strictly Come Dancing 2024, alongside his professional dance partner Dianne Buswell. The 47 year old was overcome with emotion as they were announced as this year’s champions in a tense final of the BBC competition.
Their fellow finalists – Sarah Hadland and Vito Coppola, JB Gill and Lauren Oakley, and Tasha Ghouri and Aljaž Škorjanec – gathered around them as a stunned Chris embraced Dianne tightly. He will undoubtedly continue the celebrations off the dance floor with his family: his Brazilian wife Patricia and their 11 year old daughter.
The couple first met in 2005 when CBeebies Me Too! star Chris was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Patricia was filming a documentary there. “We spent a lot of time together when the camera wasn’t running, socialising, going out and doing things, and we just had a lot of fun,” he previously shared.
The star described his wife as being “full of energy” and “took me out of my comfort zone”, while he made her laugh and was “almost this calming presence in her life that she was attracted to”. However, Chris affectionately says his wife Patricia, who hails from Brazil, brings “chaos” into their relationship, reports the Mirror.
“We were very opposite,” he revealed to Gyles Brandreth on his podcast Rosebud.
“She comes across as very British but she’s Brazilian, she came across when she was five or six. Her life is chaos in the way that Brazilian people are chaos. It’s a natural attribute of their being that they are very proud of – they bring chaos to any room.”
“The number of times she’ll be talking in Portuguese to her mum and then I’ll say to her: ‘Are you okay? What happened there? ‘ It sounds like they had the most horrific argument and they’re just talking about what they’re going to do that day.”
He has been married to Patricia for 12 years with an 11 year old daughter named Sophie. The rarely seen youngster featured on Comedians: Home Alone in 2020, where she was spotted at a kitchen table next to her dad.
In the scene, Sophie is caught laughing at something Chris says while he appears comfortable in a blue T-shirt. However, the prospect of becoming a parent initially “terrified” him.
“I was in such a dilemma about it because I knew I would regret not having kids but the thought of having kids terrified me,” he divulged to Gyles Brandreth in an exchange. “The idea of being a parent and all of the things I was going to be unable to do properly.”
“My dad, all the things he used to do with me as a kid, taking me to different places, and the time he put in helping me build things. You think ‘how am I going to be able to do those things – I’m not going to be a proper dad, I’m going to be a half dad’.”
The celebrity opened up about the thermostat tussle at home with Chris and Patricia, sharing a lighter take on their domestic debate. He quipped, “As you can imagine, we are very different in terms of our culture and our biological response to temperature,” before adding, “While my wife still needs a winter coat in 22-degree sunshine, I find it hard to cope in temperatures above about 26.”
He humorously hinted at the possibility of an extreme outcome: “I believe there’s a high likelihood that one of us might be discovered lifeless in the hallway one day, reaching out towards the thermostat, while the other has fled the country.”
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